This evening's Hartlepool Mail has confirmed that the North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust has decided to "put on hold" its plans to develop a new hospital at Wynyard. In reality this means that the Trust has not been able to secure either funding or support for its proposals and that those plans must now be mothballed, probably indefinitely, thereby relocating our hospital facilities a further 15 miles down the A19.
Regular followers of this blog will note that we have been saying for years that the Wynyard scheme was nothing more than an underhand, backdoor method of removing services from Hartlepool hospital and moving them, lock-stock and barrel, to a new facility which nobody wanted at a location which suited no-one (please see posts dated 17 January 2012, 5 April 2012, 10 May 2012, 18 May 2012, 20 May 2012, 23 June 2012, 26 June 2012, 4 July 2012, 17 July 2012, 8 August 2012, 19 September 2012, 8 January 2013, 31 January 2013, 15 May 2013, 23 May 2013, 2 June 2013, 9 July 2013 and 14 August 2013 for details of our previous involvement in the campaign to return all services to Hartlepool).
We have insisted all along that the consultation carried out by the Trust as part of its Momentum: Pathway to Healthcare proposals was deeply flawed and that the people of Hartlepool and East Durham were never convinced of the need to remove health services from our own hospital. Anyone left in any doubt about public feeling toward the Trust's proposals needed look no further than the 30,000+ name petition signed by those opposed to this imposition.
The Trust ignored the will of the people and is now stranded in an indefensible position. However, this should not be an excuse for them to hide from public demands for a full explanation of their narrow-minded, blinkered approach to a re-organisation of health provision that the people of East Durham and Hartlepool neither wanted nor supported.
